How square is a square meal?

A square perspective on the funny language called English.

I am fascinated by the English language. You can communicate volumes speaking words which, by themselves, mean nothing!

I speak with reference to the use of idioms in our everyday parlance.

How square is a square meal?

Many of the phrases and idioms that we use seem to have ‘appeared out of the blue’.

While most of us drop idioms a ‘dime a dozen’, our understanding about why we are happy to ‘speak in riddles’ is like a ‘drop in the bucket’.

Now, before you ‘jump down my throat’ ‘at the drop of a hat’, I must clarify that my intention isn’t to ‘rock the boat’.

All I am doing is being a ‘doubting Thomas’… wondering why we take things ‘at face value’ without ‘looking under the hood’!

We all behave ‘like a headless chicken’ and ‘take a raincheck’ when it comes to making an effort to ‘go the extra mile’ in ‘getting behind the scenes’ of commonly used idioms.

I decided to ‘go against the grain’ and ‘get a grasp on’ the ‘issue at hand’.

So I ‘hit the books’ to ‘get to the bottom of’ the matter.

If you’ll ‘lend me your ear’ I’ll share what I learned by ‘burning the midnight oil’.

Surprisingly, it’s not that we follow the ‘path of minimum resistance’ when it comes to ‘getting by’.

The fact is that there is ‘more than meets the eye’ when it comes to how we understand and communicate.

As humans, our process of understanding is a combination of visuals and words. The parts of our brain that process words are different from those that process visuals.

While communicating, we use both these faculties of our minds. In order to speed up our understanding of what is being said, we take the ‘best of both worlds’ and create visual images for otherwise unrelated groups of words, as we learn to communicate in English.

We don’t really ‘sieve through words’ ‘with a fine tooth comb’ but rather look at things from ‘30,000 ft. up’

It’s really as ‘plain Jane’ as that.

A ‘no brainer’ you say? As easy as putting ‘two and two together’?

The fact is that while it ‘isn’t rocket science’ very few of us have bothered to ‘bell the cat’ and ‘cut to the chase’.

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Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day
You fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way.
Kicking around on a piece of ground in your home town
Waiting for someone or something to show you the way.